Human resources director: While only some recent university graduates consider work environment an important factor ...
CarolineiAugust 27, 2021
Question regarding the wording on "few veteran employees"
Since the passage reads "few veteran employees" and not "all" is the reader to assume that this is a "some" quantifier and not a sufficient and necessary condition?
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I was also wondering about this. I got the answer right but want to be sure in the future how to approach a sentence that has S&N language in addition to quantifiers. It threw me off because it says "the only" but also says "few" so I took it as a some statement for veteran employees (not recent grads) because stress level didn't seem to guarantee all veteran employees (just a few/some). Please let me know where my reasoning went astray and how to combat this for the future. Thank you!
Emil-KunkinJanuary 19, 2022
Hi @carolinei, good question. Indeed the word few when used as a quantifier should tell us that we are not dealing with sufficient and necessary. However, In this case, the word few is actually telling us that not all veterans are part of this group, only some. The statement that "the only workers who consider stress are a few veteran employees" is in fact a sufficient statement. We could diagram it as saying
If consider stress -> one of a few veteran employees.
In this instance we could rephrase that "few" to say "one of a small group of veteran employees."
In order to tell if few is being used as a quantifier, you can check if the phrasing is along the lines of "few x are y." This is not the case here, rather the word few is being used in a more informal sense as part of an expression "one of a few."
